Today our portfolio company Code Climate is launching its new “Velocity” product into public beta. The product provides teams with data driven insights into the speed of their development process. It answers important questions, such as where in the process do engineers have to wait (e.g. long continuous integration times or long wait for code to be reviewed)? Or, how much work in progress is accumulating (and how much risk does that contain)? For more examples of the types of insights provided by Velocity, you can see the product launch page.

Bringing data driven insights to the engineering process seems like a no brainer. After all, nobody would run sales or marketing today without a ton of data. But historically there have been two obstacles, both of which Velocity by Code Climate helps overcome. First, engineering departments usually have a long list of data analytics requests from other parts of the organization and so there tends to be a “cobbler’s children” problem. Second, just looking at your own data, how do you know what’s good? Because sales and marketing have been data driven for quite some time there is a pretty decent understanding of what constitutes good metrics for say conversion rates at different stages of the funnel. Velocity solves this problem for engineering by letting teams see where they fall on a percentile basis in the industry. That’s made possible by data coming from the large number of repositories that Code Climate analyses across its customer base.

I am especially excited about this launch because with Velocity by Code Climate, teams can measure the payoff from investing in development process improvements and from putting code quality first. When we originally announced our investment in Code Climate, I wrote that “when you lead with quality in manufacturing you can in fact have all three: quality, speed and low cost. The same will be true for code.” Eventually Code Climate will also help teams track cost, but for now it lets them gain rapid and deep insight into the speed component.

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